Teen Therapy in
Washington, DC and Bethesda, MD
Survive and thrive the developmental storm
It’s hard to know what your teen needs. Do they need therapy, or do they just need to learn to take things less seriously?
Your teen seems unusually stressed. You might see that your teen:
Isolates from friends
Withdraws until they explode into yelling or crying over problems that have simple solutions
You can’t tell if they’re in a “teen stage” that will pass, or if they should talk to someone. They have asked for therapy - why? They won’t tell you, no matter how you bring it up. You wish you could convince them how wonderful they are, because they don’t seem to recognize their own strengths. They deserve to feel so confident!
You’re worried about their priorities.
They’re not sleeping or eating well
They don’t seem to smile anymore
Their grades are taking a hit
They don’t find joy in extracurriculars anymore
Is it just excessive schoolwork that is creating all this stress?
Your teen challenges your knowledge of how to help them
The ways you knew to reach your teen no longer work. You struggle with your own feelings of concern, frustration, and worry. You don’t know how you can help. How do you parent this new version of your child? Beyond creating confusion of how to appropriately respond, the intensity of feelings they direct at you is too much to bear. You hate how they can create intense feelings in you, too.
It’s normal to struggle with understanding what each child needs in different stages. Even though you might be a pro at parenting the older child, it’s normal to have totally different experiences in parenting each child.
How teen therapy helps during adolescence
Adolescence is a period of enormous psychological change. Teenagers are moving away from childhood while still figuring out who they are becoming. This can bring changes in:
Identity — figuring out who they are and who they want to become
Independence — wanting greater freedom while still needing support
Relationships — navigating changing relationships with parents, friends, and peers
Achievement — managing increasing expectations around school, performance, and the future
Emotions — experiencing feelings that can be intense or difficult to understand
Sexuality and intimacy — developing new feelings, relationships, and ways of understanding themselves
Some turmoil is part of adolescence. But sometimes a teenager becomes stuck. Anxiety, depression, withdrawal, perfectionism, conflict, or changes at school may signal that something is becoming difficult to manage alone.
Teen therapy provides a place to understand what is happening rather than focusing only on making symptoms disappear. As teenagers understand themselves better, difficult feelings can become easier to recognize and regulate.
Therapy can also become a space that belongs to the teenager—apart from the expectations of parents, teachers, and other adults. It gives them room to speak more freely, develop their own thoughts, and discover who they are becoming.
Help for teens, hope for parents
As the parent, there is a certain loneliness inherent to being the only adult to negotiate conflict involving your child. How can you come up with solutions for a teen if you don’t even have all the information (the knowledge of the teen’s internal experience)? At work, the rules of engagement for resolving conflict feel so different. You may feel competent handling complicated situations in other areas of your life, yet find yourself completely unsure of what to do when your teenager is struggling.
I will partner with you and your teen to help maximize their developmental capacities. Therapy is an exploration of how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us. One aim of therapy is to understand the psychological meaning and significance behind actions, emotions, and behaviors. A teen’s behavior is understood as a communication of feeling and emotions that may struggle to find words. As a teenager begins to understand the feelings and meanings behind their behavior, there may be less need to rely on the behavior itself to communicate what is difficult to put into words.
Together, I will help your family survive the developmental storm and thrive. Imagine feeling less worried knowing your teen has a place to think about all of their feelings at a time it’s developmentally appropriate for them not to be able to access your wisdom.